Mountains, Mannerism, Music, and Watermelons
Welcome to your April edition of Signified
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Announcing the April exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
Remy Dean on ‘A Decade in an Aeon: #Moelwyns’
These six images are selected from more than 1,500 comprising the series of photographs titled #Moelwyns — my attempt to document the ever-changing moods of the Mynyddoedd Moelwynion mountain range and the transient atmospheric conditions that only people who are lucky enough to live here, in Eryri, really get to know. I approached the #Moelwyns project more as a ‘documentary’ than as ‘landscape photography’...
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Recently ‘Boosted’ in Signifier:
The Object of Art
The 1936 Surrealist Exhibition of Objects is a good place to start discussing the subject of the object as art — the so-called objet — and its definitions. This hugely important event was held in the Paris gallery of Charles Ratton, already a dealer in African, Oceanic, and Native American arts — all of which provided inspiration for the early Surrealists. The eclectic exhibition featured more than 200 objects grouped in various categories. Although…
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‘Even if You Painted a Watermelon’ — The Palestinian Artists Who Inspired Resistance
Walking across Bristol Downs early this year, I saw kites. A lot of them. Many of the kites were homemade out of lengths of wood and painted paper. Together they danced around each other, flashes of colour against a grey British January sky. I have childhood memories of flying kites on the exact same spot, and the nostalgic memory made me smile as I walked towards the group of kite flyers. A set of colours stood out from each kite…
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Joy of Collage with Marc Chagall
The playfulness of collage seems to be a natural fit for Marc Chagall (1887–1985). He was an artist unafraid to work in many different forms including stained glass, book illustrations, tapestry, stage sets, and costume designs. So, I was excited to have the chance to see a selection of his joyful collages, ranging from the 1950s to the early 1970s, in a recent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Chagall At Work: Drawings, Ceramics and Sculptures 1945–1970. Let’s take a closer look at some of these collages…
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Popular Signifier (ICYMI)
Spotlight on one of our most popular or trending articles…
What the Future Sounds Like: the J-Pop-Art of Hatsune Miku & Kizuna Ai
Joining the lineup for this April’s massive Coachella music festival is a 16-year-old pop superstar who’s celebrating 17 years in the business. This year also marks a decade since her stage debut, in 2014 at the tender age of sixteen, when she was the opening act for Lady Gaga’s ArtPop tour… (Hang on, does that even make sense?) …since then, she’s worked with professional music producers as well as countless amateur composers…
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The Signifier : six : shot : gallery global freeview!
There’s something for everyone among our showcases of contemporary art, illustration, photography... So, please, spread the word and share the link to the freeview archive page far and wide through you SNS channels to support the artists who have exhibited with us so far…. your friends won’t run up against a paywall and we hope this will help further promote and support our exhibiting artists and their work.
The Signifier : six : shot : gallery officially launched for January 2021 and every calendar month since has hosted an artist’s showcase of just six images linked by aesthetics, techniques, processes, philosophies, formal or conceptual elements. Some of those exhibiting with us are already well-established, internationally renowned artists, others are fresh ‘emergent’ talents, and some have gone on to win major accolades since featuring.
Go to the global freeview page and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
‘~isms’: from the archives of Signifier
In this regular feature of our Signified Newsletter, we select a few articles from our archives linked by a monthly theme. Here are three articles on important ‘~isms’ in the history of art: Mannerism, Pointillism, Surrealism…
What Manner of Art is This?
During the decline of the High Renaissance, patrons began favouring a particular style of art that dispensed with serious symbolism, focussing instead on the technical skill of the artist in producing objects of graceful, sometimes whimsical, beauty. It became a kind of contest among gifted sculptors and painters to produce something more perfect, more impossibly graceful, than their contemporaries…
The Politics of Pointillism
Georges-Pierre Seurat was a Neo-Impressionist painter, who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was taught by a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who in turn had been taught by Eugène Delacroix. After taking a year out from his studies for military service, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883 and was heralded as the bright new star of French art…
Do You Know What’s Really Surreal?
The main features of Surrealism that differentiated it from Dada were a conscious intellectualism, a fascination with Marxism, Freudian psychology, Occult philosophies and with cutting-edge physics. The Surrealists were also driven by the desire to make our private realities public… and to make art that was more than it seemed, art that in some way could question and ultimately transcend ‘reality’…
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